Mark Hamill said that the main reason he agreed to take part in The Mandalorian was because Luke Skywalker’s story had always felt incomplete on screen. Across the films, audiences saw Luke’s beginning and his ending, but never the middle, the part where he had fully become a Jedi Master and reached the height of his power. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hamill explained it this way: “The reason I did Mandalorian was that Luke had a beginning and an end. There was no middle. It was like making a trilogy about James Bond as a young boy who first became aware of the Secret Service and wanted to be a part of it. Part two was him training to be an agent. Part three is earning his license to kill — The End. No From Russia With Love, Dr. No or Goldfinger. You never got to see Luke as a Master Jedi at the peak of his powers.”
Hamill emphasized that point again when talking about Luke Skywalker’s fate in the films. He said, “When they went from the original trilogy to the sequels, obviously there’s a huge gap in time where there’s all these untold stories.” In his view, there was a major chapter of Luke’s life that audiences had never been allowed to see.
Hamill also suggested that one reason viewers never got more of Luke after Return of the Jedi may have been the passage of time and the difficulty of portraying that younger version of the character. But once CGI technology had advanced far enough, he felt that if Lucasfilm wanted to continue telling stories from that era, he was ready to help. He said, “I assume they’d get an age-appropriate actor you know, and I didn’t really think about it all that much. I just don’t know, if they want to tell stories of Luke post Return of the Jedi, I wonder who they’ll get when they said they going to use the de-aging process they use in the Marvel movies. I was just gobsmacked, I didn’t answer right away, I had to think about it. But the more I thought about this is like really an opportunity that was completely unexpected but something that almost was a responsibility.”
For Hamill, returning in The Mandalorian was a chance to finally explore the version of Luke Skywalker that the films had skipped over. He saw Luke as the most idealistic hero in the saga, someone who always pushed back against adversity and came back stronger after setbacks, and he felt audiences never truly got to see that side of him in his prime. That is why the chance to step back into the role meant so much to him. As Hamill put it, “So when I got the chance, I thought, ‘Geez, this is wonderful.’”